Tale of the unexpected: The Sixth Sense Photograph: Ron Phillips/APThe Sixth Sense, M Night Shyalaman’s supernatural thriller about a little boy who sees dead people, including Bruce Willis, has been voted the film with the biggest shock.

In a poll conducted to coincide with the DVD release of Remember Me, the Robert Pattinson film whose final reel reveal failed to find universal favour in cinemas, The Sixth Sense beat Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (Norman Bates’s mum is a skeleton) into second place. Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal is actually baddie Keyser Soze) came in third.

Another Spacey-centred twist, which has him sending Gwyneth Paltrow’s head to Brad Pitt at the end of David Fincher’s thriller Seven, made it to number nine. Pitt also features on the list a couple of times: once in Seven, and again in Fight Club, in which his and Ed Norton’s characters turn out to be one and the same.

Budding scriptwriters may notice a few common themes in the big twists that made it to the top 10.

The biggest film shocks of all time

1. The Sixth Sense: Bruce Willis has been dead all along

2. Psycho: Mrs Bates has been dead all along

3. The Usual Suspects: Kevin Spacey is worse than you think

4. The Empire Strikes Back: Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father

5. Saw: Jigsaw hasn’t been dead all along

6. Fight Club: Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are the same person

7. The Wicker Man: Christopher Lee had been plotting to kill Edward Woodward all along